Western-educated
medievalists are complicit in the ongoing destruction to medieval culture in
Africa and the Near East, just as we passively allow the defunding and
desecration of medieval archives and medieval studies programs in Europe and
the Americas. There can be no apology for criminal actions under the guise of war, no excuses for the weak corrupt governments which cling to power
exploiting the citizens of Africa and the Near East. But, as a medievalist who
works with German manuscripts, and an Arab-American who follows the news from
the Middle East closely, I must point out that many of the worst losses of
medieval books and buildings have occurred in Western Europe. As we sit in our
offices accusing them of barbarism, many Arabs and Muslims are mobilizing to
protect medieval artifacts and memorializing ongoing tragedies through medieval
poetry. The destruction of books, by fire or war, should not be an
incomprehensible “act of barbarism” to medievalists, who habitually nuance the “barbaric” and often find our
own western manuscripts have been lost to war or fire. My own research is
hampered by the losses at libraries in Lübeck, Wroclaw, Dresden, and Strasbourg. Only a small portion of
the 100 boxes of medieval manuscripts relocated by the Wroclaw City Library in
1943 under threat of bombardment have been recovered; those lost to fire will never
resurface. I expect simplistic narrative of savage Muslim destroying priceless
antiquities in incomprehensible acts of barbarism from reporters compiling
stories from wire reports. Medievalists, many of whom are widely read in
postcolonial theory, and invested in recovering evidence of marginal peoples,
should know better. With each lament, we increase the threat to heritage sites
and reaffirm our own deeply paternalistic assumption that the indigenous
peoples of former British and French colonies are not trustworthy custodians of
their own national heritage. Emily O’Dell, who studies Sufism in Africa, recently argued that naming Salafist groups as barbarous “frames heritage solely as a
victim, instead of a weapon of war cleverly employed to attract media
attention, garner support and legitimacy among regional and international
Islamists, and provide potent religious symbolism.” As O’Dell recognizes, these
acts of destruction are subject to competing narratives: heritage sites
destroyed by NATO actions are written off as collateral damage while sites
destroyed by Muslims are portrayed as incomprehensible barbarism. Destruction
of heritage sites, whether by foreign or local forces, is a sacrificial act
which solidifies “both national resistance and transnational solidarity with
Islamists, [while] simultaneously demarcating religious difference and
repudiating foreign intervention.” Thus cultural heritage sites make valuable
hostages—for Western nations justifying military action, for Salafists
advocating the restoration of what they perceive as a purer Islam, and for
resistance movements. For instance, many Pakistanis linked a series of deadly
attacks on Sufi tombs and Ahmadi mosques in Lahore to US involvement in the death of Muslim civilians in Afghanistan while a
recent thread on the Timbuktu manuscripts on the Sociology of Islam listserv insinuates that the French government exploited threats to the Ahmed BabaInstitute to justify the return of French colonial rule. Last week, while on a
visit to promotethe protection of cultural heritage sites in south Lebanon, the
US Ambassador’s convoy drove over and destroyed a wall at Al-Bass; though the US embassy will be paying
for repairs, the incident has already been incorporated into several competing politically-driven narratives. Among medievalists, the use of cultural sites to demarcate between “us”
and “them” has taken a peculiar twist.

Our affective response to the loss of medieval heritage
sites reveals a disinterest in the political nuances of local conflicts, which
is exacerbated by our professional use reading postcolonial theory and
selective appropriation of Muslim, Arab, and African historical narratives to
understand the networks of cultural exchange which influenced medieval Europe.
When the medieval souks in Aleppo burned, medievalists were rightly appalled by the scope of the damage. Few realized that efforts to extinguish the fire were hampered by siege
tactics: the medieval citadel at Aleppo’s center, which is bordered by the
medieval souk, remains a vital strategic site from which the Free Syrian Army
defends their portion of the city. The Syrian Army has severely restricted
water to Aleppo as part of a siege that is to this day a bloody war of
attrition. Aleppo’s citadel is not the only medieval fortress reactivated and
irreparably damaged during modern war: the crusader-era Beaufort Castle in
southern Lebanon was first a command post for the Palestinian Liberation, then
the Israeli Defense Force and is now a Hizbullah outpost.
Medievalists are far quieter about the destruction of other medieval
artifacts ignored by the western press. In Tunisia, the birthplace of the Arab
Spring, at least 34 shrines to Tunisian saints have been damaged, among them
the thirteenth-century tomb of Sayeda Manoubia, an educated woman and Sufi who
joined the circle of Belhsan Chedly Shrines built around the tombs of Sufi saints or ‘friend of God,’ attract
pilgrimage and devotion recognizable to western medievalists, yet their destruction passes without comment.
For local populations, however, the destruction of Sufi shrines and medieval
mosques is cause for action: in Libya, a minister resigned over the destruction of Sufi shrines in Timbuktu, residents wept in the streets as Ansar Deine desecrated Sufi shrines and the fifteenth-century Sidi Yahya mosque. For both the Western and the Arab press,
reporting is about creating marketable narratives; we should know better than
to react to such reports uncritically.

I suspect that I am not the only medievalist who knows
almost nothing about the historical significance of Timbuku, or only recently learned that the
city’s manuscripts are only a small portion of the surviving testimony to
African and West African manuscript and book production. Even though I cannot
read these manuscripts, I, and other medievalists, recognize them to be
precious objects, their value enhanced by our own experiences of having
touched, smelled, and transcribed medieval documents. Our reverence for
manuscripts as objects has inspired some of my friends—both medievalists and
Arab-Americans—to propose that imperiled manuscripts be relocated to European
and American libraries. This is deeply colonialist idea. The Bibliothèque
national de France (BNFr) holds extensive collections of manuscripts acquired
from colonies and in Africa and by Napoleon’s army, which appropriated Flemish manuscripts and early
printed books from religious houses. In the 1890s, Cambridge Solomon Schechter
boxed up and rehomed The Cairo Geniza, a collection of over 210,000 medieval
Jewish manuscript fragments
. The bulk of the collection is now at Cambridge, with portions of the
collection housed at Oxford and elsewhere in the UK. Another priceless African manuscript,
the Codex Siniaticus, has been scattered in London, Leipzig, St Petersburg.
Only a few fragments remain at St Catherine’s monastery in Egypt. In January of this year, the National Library of Israel acquired a collection of medieval manuscripts from Afghanistan:
as if there were never any possibility of those manuscripts more appropriately
being kept in Afghanistan.

Our own orientalism has significant consequences for the academic
study of the medieval world and the preservation of medieval artifacts. Because
we expect the destruction of medieval artifacts as an inevitable consequence of
allowing “third-world” nations to maintain ownership of their cultural
heritage, we do nothing to support the scholars and institutions which might
best be able to protect these objects. Western academics rarely read the work
of or show support for the Arab and African scholars who curate, edit, and
publish their own medieval manuscripts, despite deplorable salaries
and little protection for academic freedom. A quick search of Speculum, the arbiter of what is enduringly important
to medieval studies, reveals a superficial interest in the Islamicate world,
evidenced by occasional book reviews and scattered articles addressing trade,
cultural exchange, and Andalusia. In 1977, the historian of Renaissance Humanism,
Paul Oskar Kristeller, warned Speculum’s readers that “our insistence on the Western tradition may easily be attacked as provincial, antiquated and even reactionary." In this millennium, leading western medievalists advocate studying
a global medieval world (for a quick overview, see here), yet write mostly about medieval oreintalism—the depiction of muslims in
western medieval literature-and rarely cite rigorous examinations of medieval
Islamicate societies. Even Eileen Joy’s powerful critique of anglophone medievalists’ failure to appreciate the “so-called ‘minority fields’ of medieval studies” advances the decentering Europe as the locus of medieval studies through
comparative work, but not the focused and respectful examination of
non-European medieval cultures at the local level. These post-colonial impulses
recognize the value of conversations about global routes, networks, and
exchanges, but overwhelmingly treat the “east” as a tool for understanding
Europe. I am fortunate to work alongside specialists interested in other
regions of the medieval world whose work overcomes challenges posed by
translation and historical reconstruction with real ingenuity. Until the
Medieval Academy, Leeds, and Kalamazoo regularly host numerous sessions on
medieval Japan, Cairo, and Timbuktu, until Speculum becomes the premier journal
to publish on Mughal India, and we invite experts on Buddhist nuns and Taoist
medicine to serve as plenary speakers for our conferences, we won’t be close to
taking the medieval world seriously.

Our own orientalism makes us doubt that Arabs and Muslims
care for their medieval past, allowed the French Army’s propagandistic use of
Mali’s manuscripts, and allows us to accept the destruction of some medieval
artifacts as inevitable. Last week, Beirut-based British journalist Robert Fisk catalogued the losses of manuscripts in Mali against the cultural destruction
in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and the iconoclasm of the Reformation. Fisk writes as if it is sufficient to understand the motivations behind
these acts of destruction, as if he agrees with Richard Dawkins that religions—among them Islam and Christianity— are inherently barbarous
and destructive. I disagree. It certainly is important to acknowledge the
destruction of books by and in the west, but it is even more important to
challenge the notion that Arabs and Muslims do not value the medieval past. For
those living in the chaos and war which followed the Arab Spring, these acts of
destruction are only one aspect of a humanitarian tragedy that must be stopped.
Over 60,000 are dead and nearly ¼ million have been displaced in Syria, at
least 100,000 are displaced in Mali, the deathtoll uncertain, and, according to UNESCO, many of the most-endangered world heritage sites are medieval. As the Arab press reports more massacres
and scenes of destruction emerge, medieval poetry is the first form of
lamentation, medieval history the framework for understanding carnage, and the
proof that there is hope for peace and restoration. Zayde Antrim, a historian of medieval Syria, recently published a eulogy for Damascus framed through medieval poetry mourning the city’s destruction by Tamerlane: “It is not the first time in its
history that Damascus (or Hama or Aleppo) has been destroyed, but it is worth
repeating al-Ghuzuli’s final prayer that it be the last: Wash with the water of
security the face of our hope/ and by your grace keep away the advent of
tyrants.” Ayman Wafai, an Arab-American engineer I have known since
gradeschool, recently marked his sorrow on Facebook with a verse the 11th
century polymath ibn Hazm wrote to lament civil war in Al-Andalus and the
destruction of Cordoba: “I see before my eyes the destruction of that noble
citadel which i had once known as beautiful and prosperous in a stable, well
ordered atmosphere in which i had grown up; it's courtyard once full of people,
now empty.” Citing Hamlet, Abdullah Al-Otaibi advocates looking at the
instability across the near east “through the lens of history, particularly in
terms of the historical relationship between doctrines and sects.” Following news of a massacre at Ma’aarat al Nu’man, my first act
of mourning was to log in to Facebook and post verses and images I first used
to discuss the infamous massacre and cannibalism there during the first crusade with my students.
Just as the citizens of Timbuktu and the taxpayers of South Africa saved Mali’s
manuscripts from war, Muslims and Arabs continue to grieve for, cling to, and
recall our own medieval history. This is our world falling apart. These are our
friends and family in danger or dying. These are our countrymen covered in
blood and mourning in the sooty rubble. This is a perpetually unfolding tragedy
which brings us to tears because we can find no way to make the killing stop.
This is our history crumbled in the ashes.

This is our own orientalism. When someone defecates in a
library and then tries to burn it down, as happened at the University of
Missouri last year, or floods and fires destroy libraries, we shrug and assume
we could have done nothing to prevent these losses. Yet when men motivated by
patriotism or piety sacrifice a library or a mausoleum in Africa or the Near
East, we assume citizens should have acted, marking anyone who failed to stop
this destruction as an incomprehensible other. Each affective response
increases the likelihood of more manuscript losses in our own libraries, and on
the shifting front lines of revolutionary wars in Africa and Asia. So weep and
lament for the lost tomes of Timbuktu, the ruined fortress of Aleppo, the
shrines effaced from the Hijaz, the medieval cities endangered in Yemen, but do
not forget the thousands of books and manuscripts lost in Europe and North
America. Medievalists must confront our own orientalism and then take action to
protect what we all care about: human lives, human history, medieval heritage.
At the very least, we should bring the same critical tools which inform our own
academic work to our reading of current events. But our academic business is
education and disputation. If you are moved by threats to medieval artifacts,
then demand that your government and your professional organizations move to
stop that destruction. Saving the manuscripts will not provide shelter for the
homeless, medicine for the wounded, or heal the deep psychological trauma of
war, but it may introduce political stability. Because we value the material
remains of the medieval past, we must also seek to protect civilians who live
alongside these “treasures.” Their destruction is only “inevitable” if we
continue to assume that it is.

Disclaimer

This blog solely reflects the opinions and ideas of its authors. Nothing here should, in any way, be taken as being endorsed by any institutions or organizations affiliated with said authors. And you should already know this.